SAM EATON, Homelands Productions: The Danajon double barrier reef off of Bohol Island in the southern Philippines is one of the richest marine biodiversity hot spots had the world.

But just a short boat ride away, more than a million people depend on these fishing grounds for their food and livelihoods. Rice may be the staple food of the Philippines, but fish provide most of the protein and daily diet. And as the population of communities like this one soar, nearly tripling in the last three decades, the effect on the reef has been devastating.

Fishermen are resorting to extreme tactics to boost their declining catch.

NAZARIO AVENIDO, patrol volunteer: We capture one boat this morning.

SAM EATON: Nazario Avenido and his group of volunteers operate 24-hour patrols, trying to protect their local fishing grounds. Illegal fishing has become rampant. Many use dynamite or cyanide, indiscriminately killing everything within their reach.

Avenido has confiscated more than 50 boats and hundreds of illegal nets in recent years.

Today, he seized this boat. Its owner, who escaped capture, was using a banned net that wreaks havoc on spawning grounds and sensitive corals. Avenido says the violators aren’t bad people. They’re just hungry.

NAZARIO AVENIDO: Because there is no other solution, especially when they are a very poor family.

SAM EATON: Poor in a country that has one of the highest population growth rates in all of Southeast Asia, every year adding about two million more mouths to feed.

This is an amazing display of what a flat top guitar can do, it’s like a fiddle, a piano and a drum had a beautiful love child. Wyatt’s subtle textural rhythm and Tony’s screaming leads stand in stark contrast to each other, and yet they both are playing the same instrument, in fact the same model, how bout that.

The Rice brother’s here put on a display unlike any other in the pickin world. I could listen to this all day, let alone watch it! Praise BE!

It’s some hot pickin’ in the middle of January.

If you buy stuff, especially Apple products, you owe it to yourself to go listen to the Jan 06, 2112 edition of This American Life.

Basically a guy went over to China to see where the Apple products he loves so much are made. He came home and turned it into a one man show that is absolutely riveting and totally supports my decision to make stuff in the USA (or any developed country).

Having just heard Rick Pope on The Itinerant Angler podcast I think it an appropriate time to post this. If you go back in the archives you can also hear Tim Boyle of Columbia and Yvon Chouinard wax poetic about being “international” manufacturers on earlier Itinerant Angler podcasts.

Keep in mind when listening to the This American Life show that Foxconn, the factory where many of Apple’s cool iProducts are made is a high profile high tech company, and the conditions are probably better than the places where many of our clothes and garments are made. Garment manufacture in some places is a dirty business. Dyes are used, washing systems and abrasion systems are used to distress the denim we wear. Resins and epoxy coatings are used to coat the technical fabrics we wear.

Who is making sure that the leftovers of the resins and dyes aren’t poured into the creek? Who is making sure they don’t burn the remnants because its cheaper to buy new than recycle the old? Who is protecting the workers? Who is looking out for them? Who is looking out for the environment around the factories?

A big thing I heard loud and clear in the This American piece is that things are still largely DONE BY HAND. No matter how crazy that sounds, it makes sense. Robots are expensive and take a LONG time to train. (i.e. program) People are pretty smart by comparison and learn quickly. So it makes sense.

I’m not one of those people who think everything should be made by an artisan in a workshop one at at a time. I appreciate that, and seek it out whenever possible and this blog celebrates because it’s rarity in our wold today. But for the general population that kind of manufacturing is a luxury that we can’t afford. Just like hunting all your meat and growing all your own veggies. There simply isn’t enough room for that to apply to the entire population of the world. If we want to make things sustainable we need to find a middle ground where we can take care of our environment and our workers and make things that people can use.

During the industrial revolution the United States and Europe went through what Asia and the developing world is going through right now. They owe it to the world to take the lessons we learned from history and not repeat them. Leap-frog over those problems and get to the good stuff.

Also we owe it to ourselves and to the world not to support grievous violations of workers rights, like 34 hour shifts.

When I had a good idea for a new line of products I used US based manufactures.

Aside from the way cool cover art, and the catchy title Matt Flinner Trio’s new album Winter Harvest for Compass records is really what good music sounds like. It’s simple. Too the point. It’s stripped down. Dry. Contains no fluffy stuff but plenty of good licks, both hot and cool. Tasteful. Well Engineered. Easy on the Ears. Focused. Complete. Improvised but well rehearsed. Thorough. Detailed. Intimate but expansive. Unadorned but ornate.

I won’t go so far as to say that it approcahes the level of greatness like say, the original DGQ album, but it is in that same vein. A perfect blend of bluegrass tone and instrumentation with the harmonic themes and complexity of jazz. A seemless fusing of perfectly aged woods and wire. An open landscape of zen like pastures with a dry wind blowing across the tall grass. You should buy it. It’s worth it.

This year under the Christmas tree I found two books that I’ve been wanting to read for a while, Ninety-two in the Shade and Gallatin Canyon.

Somehow  between having two small children, a full time job, starting a small business, and steelheading, I managed to tear through this book in a matter of a day or two during the holidays. Based on my first experience reading McGuane I was expecting slow going. When I first read The Longest Silence I found myself re-reading sentences two and three times and still scratching my head wondering what he was saying, and 92 was similar in that regard but because of its narrative style, I didn’t feel like had to re-read so much. It was obviously written under the influence of quite a few mind altering substances and with that in mind it’s ok to just gloss over parts you don’t understand because part of being under the influence is just moving past things that seem odd or out of place. You just take note of the absurdity and move along, no re-reading required.

The book, to me, is like an updated more psychedelic version of To Have and Have Not. But where Big Papa was content to lay the tragic out in all its sad plainness, McGuane plays up the colorful absurdity of KW in the 70s.

Like any good book there are plenty of take aways and allegories for your own life. There are plenty of characters we can identify from our lives no matter how absurd. There are plenty of vignettes that ring true in our lives no matter how far out.

For a fishing-centric book it’s one that manages to find a great plot, have some serious literary depth but not to a level of pretension that I thought The Longest Silence was slightly guilty of.

92 is a book that finds a nice middle ground between gonzo absurdity that you might expect from  a Hunter S.Thompson and the straight-faced dead-pan delivery of Hemingway. It’s fishing details and maritime minutia are given with enough confidence and spread out enough to interest those of us with an angling psychosis but not so much so as to make it painful for those who may not be as angling obsessed.

For anyone who’s been on a flat chasing nervous water, hallucinating in the sun, wondering if those are fishing pushing or just your mind playing tricks on you, pick up a copy of Ninety-Two in the Shade. It’s just like that but magnified in the life or death prismatic kaleidoscope of Key West before it had cruise ships.

Chew on this, it’s worth a look. I’ve been to Merelfest a bunch but not when it was this small. Would’ve been nice, but thanks to YouTube now we can.

On an unrelated note, tonight I play my first show with a band since parking the wagon in the weeds. It’ll be interesting, especially with my two boys in attendance. They’ve not seen their dad play much, as I’ve been mostly not playing much since they’ve been born. Look out!

But the other day I went to the eye doctor for a random check-up, I hadn’t been in over ten years. My eyes and my vision were fine, or so I thought.

Upon closer inspection the Optometrist noticed what she called a “swollen optic nerve”. She was cagey about what that might mean, but Google is brutal and revealed a list of causes that ranged from BAD to REALLY REALLY BAD! Needless to say the Smith house was a little freaked out.

The optometrist referred me right away to a specialist called a neuro-opthamologist, any time you have to go see someone with “neuro” in the title it isn’t fun right?

So with trepidation I went this Tuesday morning to see the  neuro-opthamologist. After a tense few minutes in his office he revealed that it was NOT in-fact a swollen optic nerve, it was ocular  histoplasmosis.

Histoplasmosis is a disease caused when airborne spores of the fungus Histoplasma capsulatum are inhaled into the lungs, the primary infection site. This microscopic fungus, which is found throughout the world in river valleys and soil where bird or bat droppings accumulate, is released into the air when soil is disturbed by plowing fields, sweeping chicken coops, or digging holes.

Histoplasmosis is often so mild that it produces no apparent symptoms. Any symptoms that might occur are often similar to those from a common cold. In fact, if you had histoplasmosis symptoms, you might dismiss them as those from a cold or flu, since the body’s immune system normally overcomes the infection in a few days without treatment.

Ok so now that we have the technical crap out of the way basically at some point in my life, who knows when, I’ve been infected with the histoplasmosis spore and it moved to my eyes creating scarring. The mold and spore that causes histoplasmosis is endemic to the area I live. They call it the histo-belt, as its basically a belt around the Ohio and Mississippi rivers. However it also happens to be present in bird droppings. If you’ve been following this blog for a while you might have seen some posts about the birds that I’ve bought over the past few years to train my lovely English Setter Nick. I cleaned up a lot of poop, from quail and chukars over the past few years.

The Doctors all agreed that there is no way to tell if my infection was recent or from a while ago, aka if it was from the birds or just growing up around here. The mold just lives int the dirt. So just playing around and getting into stuff can give you this issue.

Anyway, if you buy birds, or if you shoot birds, or you raise birds, be careful with the poop and handling of the birds, it might make you sick and permanently hurt your vision. And if you are a bird hunter like me, get your eyes checked sooner rather than later. The docs can catch it and they can save your vision.

Apparently Histoplasmosis is the leading cause of blindness in 20-40 year olds in this country. For the rest of my life I’m going to have to have laser scans of my retinas to make sure new blood vessels aren’t growing behind my scar tissue and threatening my ability to see.

For now my sight remains 20-20 and I don’t need glasses, but we’ll be watching it closely.

Shoot straight and wear mask if you’re cleaning up poop.

That, my friends, is a man who lived it, ate it, drank it, walked it, talked it, played it, and like all us, in the end, became it.

Long live the old time river man.